Wendy and I have always lived in a small house (it is a little hard to be married and raise kids in 150 sq feet) and I personally prefer to be on the grid rather than off it but at the same time he is correct in that we need very little to live happily with. Too often what we own ends up owning us and we start to make life decisions based on what is right for our possessions rather than what is good for us.

The book looks at how we consume in five main areas

housing

food

technology

utilities

transportation

Of the five areas, the sections on housing, food and tech interested me the most. While living in 140 square feet isn’t practical for many of us, there is a lot in the book worth pondering and adopting. I found his best arguments to be based around how we get caught in the trap of living in bigger spaces which require us to buy more stuff and then we need even more space because we have all of this stuff. If you feel trapped at times but the culture we live in, this is a good book to read as it shows there is a different way to live. While context is important to understand while figuring all of this out, there is enough in the book for anyone to be able to read and rethink how we go about this thing called life.

Of course the running joke was that if I had read this book before we started to paint the cabin, we would have only had to scrape down half of the cabin OR we could turn it into a duplex 🙂

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5 thoughts on “Review: Life on a Diet”

Sounds like an interesting book. I also wonder if the author comments on an “information diet”? It’s something I’ve been thinking about recently as I ponder the tons of unusable information I consume each day and the space it takes up in my consciousness. Do I really need to know about the Jolie twins? What could I do with that mind space instead?

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This is a weblog about urban issues, technology, & culture published by Jordon Cooper since 2001. You can read about me and the site here and if you are looking for one of my columns in The StarPhoenix, you can find them here.